In an interview, Kalpit Jain, Group CEO of Netcore Solutions, talks about marketing technology and how it can help brand marketers in achieving deeper customer engagement.

Gone are the days of plain vanilla marketing strategies, which were mostly about releasing a campaign on TV, print, radio and a banner ad on digital. Thanks to companies like Netcore, today marketing has evolved greatly and now leverages technologies to deliver real time, contextual and personalised campaigns to target customers. In an interview, Kalpit Jain, Group CEO of Netcore Solutions, talks about marketing technology and how it can help brand marketers in achieving deeper customer engagement. An edited excerpt:

Do we need a combination of human and machine intelligence to bring about the most effective outcomes for customers?

Yes, absolutely. By effectively leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), marketers can establish an accurate and reliable predictive foundation for multi-channel engagement based on historical customer behaviour, actions and inactions. Intelligent human intervention will help ‘martechers’ recognise and appropriately harness the hidden patterns and trends facilitated by this technology.

While insights maybe plenty, it is prudent human discretion that decides which insights are worth taking an action in order to justify and optimise marketing ROI.

What kind of role does AI play in creating effective marketing strategies?

AI, when combined with marketing automation, helps in translating data into decisions, creates meaningful conversations and further impacts the ROI positively. It enhances and empowers marketing abilities. In today’s digitally hyperactive world, creating engaging campaigns which stay on top of the consumer’s mind is every marketer’s Holy Grail.

But achieving this is no cake walk; brands need to know customer behaviour across devices and platforms and then make strategies to reach the right target audience with the right content at the right time. By combining AI with marketing automation, a marketer can craft highly personalised, contextual and real-time consumer experience.

Large enterprises do have the necessary budget, but SMBs today also want to embrace the power of analytics and marketing automation. What are your thoughts on this?

SMBs & start-ups definitely need MarTech tools as the cost of acquiring new customers is five times higher than engaging and nurturing an existing customer. Three factors which are important for adoption of a MarTech platform by SMBs are Affordability, Ease of Use and Easy to Integrate.

Netcore’s Smartech is built for scale, enabling start-ups and SMBs to grow exponentially across digital channels. We also provide industry-leading MarTech consultancy to these businesses, helping them optimise their campaign performance across channels and orchestrate seamless multi-channel, cross-channel customer journeys using intelligent marketing automation.

Additionally, we have a self-serve (DIY sign-up) process with rich and user-friendly documentation manual that facilitates easy integration. To facilitate this, we have a freemium offer that allows both web and app businesses in their infancy to access our platform, in terms of advanced analytics and engagement features, till 100,000 monthly active users (MAUs). Couple with the power of an AI-driven platform and expert advice, the sky is often the limit for such businesses as they look to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

Can you elaborate on your flagship solutions? What has been the market response for these offerings?

We primarily function in two areas – marketing technology and CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service). In marketing technology, our flagship product is Smartech and on CPaaS, we have our AI-powered, API-based email delivery platform - Pepipost.

Today, Netcore has more than 3,000 customers in India and abroad. Our solutions help deliver over seven billion emails and over three billion SMSes a month; create more than 11 billion customer connects on a monthly basis; and handle over 30 billion events a month. Our customer base comprises of brands across industry verticals and includes Thomas Cook, GoAir, Cleartrip, HDFC, Kotak, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, UTI, Reliance, Vodafone, Godrej, ITC, OLA, Pfizer and OLX along with international brands like Seek Asia, Tokopedia, Blibli, Standard Chartered, FCMB and GT Bank among others.

Please share some insights on the market landscape you are in currently? What are the biggest growth drivers?

We represent the MarTech space, an amalgamation of marketing and technology. The MarTech landscape is huge and continuously growing. As per Gartner, MarTech has jumped to 29% of the CMO’s budget (comprising of 3.25% of total company spend on MarTech for 2018-2019). Gartner also predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their CIO counterparts. Additionally, as per Scott Brinker there are approximately 7,000 companies working in the MarTech space.

The biggest growth driver is that all businesses and brands are going digital. There is a significant increase in digital adoption and digital spending, new digital platforms are evolving, user base is growing, and mobile penetration is increasing as handsets are becoming cheaper. Today, customers are present everywhere. With a decreasing attention span the only way to effectively engage with them is through highly personalised, relevant and contextual communication. Thus, it is important to have a cross-channel engagement suite that helps in targeting the right user at the right time with the right message on the right channel.

What is Netcore’s USP that makes it stand apart from its competitors?

Our 21 years of continued service and dedication to various customers is a testimonial to our achievements in the MarTech space. We have been committed to the MarTech space and have a domain expertise in email marketing; 45% of India’s email traffic goes via Netcore! We have seen the industry transform, adapt and grow – right from Email to SMS to App. Our USP includes

Full Stack: We are a full-stack company right from delivery to campaign management services to journey orchestration to analytics to consulting services. Our engineering practices and data-driven insights help brands in delivering a differentiated customer experience at scale. Additionally, Netcore’s Smartech communication channels are self-owned thus more secure and reliable, ensuring timely receipt of notifications to each and every user. A lot of industry players use third-party vendors as partners to push their clients’ communication across channels such as email and SMS. We are an Industry-Leading Marketing Consultancy providing customised solutions to every client to drive their KPIs northwards, right from on-boarding and training to campaign optimisation and new feature adoption. This gives us a major edge over the competition.

Empowers Mobile-First Clients With Cutting Edge Features: While analytics and engagement help our ‘app-first’ clients boost revenues and retention, our feature Push Amplification has become a major game changer, helping brands reach a larger section of their customer base with a hyper-personalised outreach.

Embraces True Power of AI: Netcore’s Smartech realised long ago the significance of AI and ML in marketing and invested heavily to create a complete suite of features, powered by AI and supported by ML, focused on uplifting KPIs. Our Push Amplification feature is the saviour to the push notification delivery issues caused mainly due to OS level restrictions on certain Chinese Android handsets as well as iOS devices.

What are the plans going forward to fuel growth?

On the marketing technology front, we have a continuous focus on marketing automation, email marketing, mobile marketing and marketing analytics. We are also foraying into other adjacent domains like advanced Customer Data Platform (CDP), Experimentation, Personalization and Conversational Analytics. Our transactional email delivery service,Pepipost, will go the CPaaS way with more channels being added to it like SMS, Voice, and WhatsApp, apart from email.

Netcore’s objective is to provide an intelligent platform to marketers, a platform that uses ML and AI to understand customers’ behaviour, their needs and helps in automating and optimizing the customer journey and communication. We are now an AI-first enterprise with a sole aim to help brands create impactful consumer connects and deliver customer experience par excellence. To this end, we have crafted features such as Send Time Optimisation, Subject Line Optimisation, and Preferred Channel & Smart Segments. For future, our focus is on devising Advanced ML & AI initiatives in the areas of content optimisation and dynamic website personalisation.

What are some of the challenges that you foresee in the near future and how do you plan to overcome them?

Some of the challenges that we foresee are regulatory norms like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which govern data access and data localisation. We are building capabilities in the product thereby creating a hybrid structure and localised set up in different countries.

Also, adopting new processes, embedding it and on-boarding end users are neither fast nor easy. Hence, we have built a customer success team (CSM) that gets involved with customers from day one to understand their use cases. CSM closely works with the implementation team to complete the complex integration and helps in implementing the right use case for the brand.

What’s your strategy for the global market?

Netcore is a leader in MarTech space in India. Netcore is headquartered in Mumbai, India with offices in 12 locations in 8 countries across SEA, MEA & USA. We are dreaming big for US. As a strategy, we will continue to enter new markets in SEA and Africa via feet on street model.

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